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Game Development vocabulary · Production, QA & Playtesting

Postmortem

Meaning in game development, with examples

/ˌpoʊstˈmɔːrtəm/nounCommon term

In game development, postmortem means: A review held after a project or release in which the team discusses what went right, what went wrong and what to do differently next time.

In Turkish: proje değerlendirmesi, postmortem, geriye dönük analiz

How it is used

Developers often publish postmortems as articles or conference talks, which are excellent reading for learners. Also written post-mortem. Agile teams hold similar but shorter meetings called retrospectives.

Example sentences

  1. In the postmortem, everyone agreed the art pipeline had slowed us down.

  2. Her postmortem about launching on Steam with no marketing budget is worth reading.

Common collocations

  • write a postmortem
  • project postmortem
  • hold a postmortem
  • what went right
  • what went wrong
  • milestoneAn agreed point in development when specific work must be delivered and reviewed, such as a playable demo, alpha or beta; publishers often pay the studio per milestone.
  • scope creepThe slow, uncontrolled growth of a project as new features and ideas keep being added without extra time or people, which often causes delays and crunch.
  • crunchA period of very long working hours, often including nights and weekends, that a team works to meet a deadline, usually before a milestone or release.
  • game jamAn event where people make a small game from scratch in a short, fixed time, usually 48 to 72 hours, often around a theme announced at the start.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Production, QA & Playtesting

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